New paper by Gordon, Eric and Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica and Balestra, Martina: “…Just as the rapidly evolving landscape of connectivity and communications technology is transforming the individual’s experience of the social sphere, what it means to participate in civic life is also changing, both in how people do it and how it is measured. Civic engagement includes all the ways in which individuals attend to the concerns of public life, how one learns about and participates in all of the issues and contexts beyond one’s immediate private or intimate sphere. New technologies and corresponding social practices, from social media to mobile reporting, are providing different ways to record, share, and amplify that attentiveness. Media objects or tools that impact civic life can be understood within two broad types: those designed specifically with the purpose of community engagement in mind (for instance, a digital game for local planning or an app to give feedback to city council) or generic tools that are subsequently appropriated for engaging a community (such as Twitter or Facebook’s role in the Arab Spring or London riots). Moreover, these tools can mediate any number of relationships between or among citizens, local organizations, or government institutions. Digitally mediated civic engagement runs the gamut of phenomena from organizing physical protests using social media (e.g., Occupy), to using digital tools to hack institutions (e.g., Anonymous), to using city-produced mobile applications to access and coproduce government services, to using digital platforms for deliberating. Rather than try to identify what civic media tools look like in the midst of such an array of possibilities (by focusing on in depth examples or case studies), going forward we will instead focus on how digital tools expand the context of civic life and motivations for engagement, and what participating in civic life looks like in a digital era.
We present this literature review as a means of exploring the intersection of theories of human behavior with the motivations for and benefits of engaging in civic life. We bring together literature from behavioral economics, sociology, psychology and communication studies to reveal how civic actors, institutions, and decision-making processes have been traditionally understood, and how emerging media tools and practices are forcing their reconsideration.“
Four critiques of open data initiatives
Blog by Rob Kitchin: “The arguments concerning the benefits of open data are now reasonably well established and include contentions that open data lead to increased transparency and accountability with respect to public bodies and services; increases the efficiency and productivity of agencies and enhances their governance; promotes public participation in decision making and social innovation; and fosters economic innovation and job and wealth creation (Pollock 2006; Huijboom and Van der Broek 2011; Janssen 2012; Yiu 2012).
What is less well examined are the potential problems affecting, and negative consequences of, open data initiatives. Consequently, as a provocation for Wednesday’s (Nov 13th, 4-6pm) Programmable City open data event I thought it might be useful to outline four critiques of open data, each of which deserves and demands critical attention: open data lacks a sustainable financial model; promotes a politics of the benign and empowers the empowered; lacks utility and usability; and facilitates the neoliberalisation and marketisation of public services. These critiques do not suggest abandoning the move towards opening data, but contend that open data initiatives need to be much more mindful of what data are being made open, how data are made available, how they are being used, and how they are being funded.”
Privacy in the 21st Century: From the “Dark Ages” to “Enlightenment”?
Paper by P. Kitsos and A. Yannoukakou in the International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP): “The events of 9/11 along with the bombarding in Madrid and London forced governments to resort to new structures of privacy safeguarding and electronic surveillance under the common denominator of terrorism and transnational crime fighting. Legislation as US PATRIOT Act and EU Data Retention Directive altered fundamentally the collection, processing and sharing methods of personal data, while it granted increased powers to police and law enforcement authorities concerning their jurisdiction in obtaining and processing personal information to an excessive degree. As an aftermath of the resulted opacity and the public outcry, a shift is recorded during the last years towards a more open governance by the implementation of open data and cloud computing practices in order to enhance transparency and accountability from the side of governments, restore the trust between the State and the citizens, and amplify the citizens’ participation to the decision-making procedures. However, privacy and personal data protection are major issues in all occasions and, thus, must be safeguarded without sacrificing national security and public interest on one hand, but without crossing the thin line between protection and infringement on the other. Where this delicate balance stands, is the focal point of this paper trying to demonstrate that it is better to be cautious with open practices than hostage of clandestine practices.”
Peacekeeping 4.0: Harnessing the Potential of Big Data, Social Media, and Cyber Technologies
Chapter by John Karlsrud in “Cyberspace and International Relations: Theory, Prospects and Challenges”(Edited by Jan-Frederik Kremer, and Benedikt Müller): “Since the Cold War, peacekeeping has evolved from first-generation peacekeeping that focused on monitoring peace agreements, to third-generation multidimensional peacekeeping operations tasked with rebuilding states and their institutions during and after conflict. However, peacekeeping today is lagging behind the changes marking our time. Big Data, including social media, and the many actors in the field may provide peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations with information and tools to enable them to respond better, faster and more effectively, saving lives and building states. These tools are already well known in the areas of humanitarian action, social activism, and development. Also the United Nations, through the Global Pulse initiative, has begun to discover the potential of “Big Data for Development,” which may in time help prevent violent conflict. However, less has been done in the area of peacekeeping. UN member states should push for change so that the world organization and other multilateral actors can get their act together, mounting a fourth generation of peacekeeping operations that can utilize the potentials of Big Data, social media and modern technology—“Peacekeeping 4.0.” The chapter details some of the initiatives that can be harnessed and further developed, and offers policy recommendations for member states, the UN Security Council, and UN peacekeeping at UN headquarters and at field levels.”
NEW: The Open Governance Knowledge Base
In its continued efforts to organize and disseminate learnings in the field of technology-enabled governance innovation, today, The Governance Lab is introducing a collaborative, wiki-style repository of information and research at the nexus of technology, governance and citizenship. Right now we’re calling it the Open Governance Knowledge Base, and it goes live today.
Our goal in creating this collaborative platform is to provide a single source of research and insights related to the broad, interdiscplinary field of open governance for the benefit of: 1) decision-makers in governing institutions seeking information and inspiration to guide their efforts to increase openness; 2) academics seeking to enrich and expand their scholarly pursuits in this field; 3) technology practitioners seeking insights and examples of familiar tools being used to solve public problems; and 4) average citizens simply seeking interesting information on a complex, evolving topic area.
While you can already find some pre-populated information and research on the platform, we need your help! The field of open governance is too vast, complex and interdisciplinary to meaningfully document without broad collaboration.
Here’s how you can help to ensure this shared resource is as useful and engaging as possible:
- What should we call the platform? We want your title suggestions. Leave your ideas in the comments or tweet them to us @TheGovLab.
- And more importantly: Share your knowledge and research. Take a look at what we’ve posted, create an account, refer to this MediaWiki formatting guide as needed and start editing!
Smithsonian turns to crowdsourcing for massive digitization project
PandoDaily: “There are 5 million plant specimens in the US Herbarium at the Natural History Museum’s Botany Department, one of the most extensive collections of plant life in the world. They all have labels. But only 1.3 million of those labels can be read by computers. That’s where you come in.
Jason Shen and Sarah Allen, a pair of Presidential Innovation Fellows working with the Smithsonian Institute to improve its open data initiatives, have gone all Mechanical Turk on the esteemed knowledge network.
In a pilot project that is serving as a test run for other large Smithsonian scientific collections – accouning for a total of about 126 million specimens – the innovation fellows are crowdsourcing the transcription of scanned images of the labels.
To get involved, you don’t need to commit to a certain number of hours, or make yourself available at specific times. You just log into the Smithsonian’s recently established transcription site, select a project to work on, and start transcribing. Different volunteers can work on the same project at different times. When you’ve done your bit, you submit it for review, at which point a different volunteer comes in to check to see that you’ve done the transcription correctly.
So, for instance, you might get to look at specimens collected by Martin W. Gorman on his 1902 expedition to Alaska’s Lake Iliamna Region, and read his thoughts on his curious findings. If you’re the type to get excited by a bit of vintage potentilla fruitcosa, then this is your Disneyland.
It’s the sort of crowdsourcing initiative that has been going on for years in other corners of the Internet, but the Smithsonian is only just getting going. It has long thought of itself as passer-on of knowledge – its mission is “the increase and diffusion of knowledge” – with the public as inherent recipients rather than contributors, so the “let’s get everyone to help us with this gargantuan task” mentality has not been its default position. It does rely on a lot of volunteers to lead tours and maintain back rooms, and the likes, but organizing knowledge is another thing…
Shen and Allen quietly launched the Smithsonian Transcription Center in August as part of a wider effort to digitize all of the Institute’s collections. The Herbarium effort is one of the most significant to date, but other projects have included field notes of bird observations to letters written between 20th-century American artists. More than 1,400 volunteers have contributed to the projects to date, accounting for more than 18,000 transcriptions.”
Twitter and Society
New book by Weller, Katrin / Bruns, Axel / Burgess, Jean / Mahrt, Merja / Puschmann, Cornelius (eds.): “Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has evolved from a niche service to a mass phenomenon; it has become instrumental for everyday communication as well as for political debates, crisis communication, marketing, and cultural participation. But the basic idea behind it has stayed the same: users may post short messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and follow the updates posted by other users. Drawing on the experience of leading international Twitter researchers from a variety of disciplines and contexts, this is the first book to document the various notions and concepts of Twitter communication, providing a detailed and comprehensive overview of current research into the uses of Twitter. It also presents methods for analyzing Twitter data and outlines their practical application in different research contexts.”
You Are Your Data
Sara M. Watson in Slate: “We are becoming data. Every day, our smartphones, browsers, cars, and even refrigerators generate information about our habits. When we click “I agree” on terms of service, we opt in to systems in which we are known only by our data. So we need to be able to understand ourselves as data, too.
To understand what that might mean for the average person in the future, we should look to the Quantified Self community, which is at the frontier of understanding what our role as individuals in a data-driven society might look like. Quantified Self began as a Meetup community sharing personal stories of self-tracking techniques, and is now a catchall adjective to describe the emerging set of apps and sensors available to consumers to facilitate self-tracking, such as the Fitbit or Nike Fuelband. Some of the self-tracking practices of this group come across as extreme (experimenting with the correlation between butter consumption and brain function). But what is a niche interest today could be widely marketed tomorrow—and accordingly, their frustrations may soon be yours…
Instead, I propose that we should have a “right to use” our personal data: I should be able to access and make use of data that refers to me. At best, a right to use would reconcile both my personal interest in the small-scale insights and the firms’ large-scale interests in big data insights from the larger population. These interests are not in conflict with each other.
Of course, to translate this concept into practice, we need to work out matters of both technology and policy.
What data are we asking for? Are we asking for data that individuals have opted into creating, like self-tracking fitness applications? Should we broaden that definition to describe any data that refers to our person, such as behavioral data collected by cookies and gathered by third-party data brokers? These definitions will be hard to pin down.
Also, what kind of data? Just that which we’ve actively opted in to creating, or does it expand to the more hidden, passive, transactional data? Will firms exercise control over the line between where “raw” data becomes processed and therefore proprietary? If we can’t begin to define the data representation of a “step” in an activity tracker, how will we standardize access to that information?
Access to personal data also suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem right now. We don’t see greater consumer demand for this because we don’t yet have robust enough tools to make use of disparate sets of data as individuals, and yet such tools are not gaining traction without proven demand.”
Transparency 2.0: The Fundamentals of Online Open Government
White Paper by Granicus: “Open government is about building transparency, trust, and engagement with the public. Today, with 80% of the North American public on the Internet, it is becoming increasingly clear that building open government starts online. Transparency 2.0 not only provides public information, but also develops civic engagement, opens the decision-making process online, and takes advantage of today’s technology trends.
Citizen ideation & feedback. While open data comprised much of what online transparency used to be, today, government agencies have expanded openness to include public records, legislative data, decision-making workflow, and citizen ideation and feedback.
This paper outlines the principles of Transparency 2.0, the fundamentals and best practices for creating the most advanced and comprehensive online open government that over a thousand state, federal, and local government agencies are now using to reduce information requests, create engagement, and improve efficiency.”
White House Unveils Big Data Projects, Round Two
Information Week: “The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Networking and Information Technology R&D program (NITRD) on Tuesday introduced a slew of new big-data collaboration projects aimed at stimulating private-sector interest in federal data. The initiatives, announced at the White House-sponsored “Data to Knowledge to Action” event, are targeted at fields as varied as medical research, geointelligence, economics, and linguistics.
The new projects are a continuation of the Obama Administration’s Big Data Initiative, announced in March 2012, when the first round of big-data projects was presented.
Thomas Kalil, OSTP’s deputy director for technology and innovation, said that “dozens of new partnerships — more than 90 organizations,” are pursuing these new collaborative projects, including many of the best-known American technology, pharmaceutical, and research companies.
Among the initiatives, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NASA have set up the NASA Earth eXchange, or NEX, a collaborative network to provide space-based data about our planet to researchers in Earth science. AWS will host much of NASA’s Earth-observation data as an AWS Public Data Set, making it possible, for instance, to crowdsource research projects.
An estimated 4.4 million jobs are being created between now and 2015 to support big-data projects. Employers, educational institutions, and government agencies are working to build the educational infrastructure to provide students with the skills they need to fill those jobs.
To help train new workers, IBM, for instance, has created a new assessment tool that gives university students feedback on their readiness for number-crunching careers in both the public and private sector. Eight universities that have a big data and analytics curriculum — Fordham, George Washington, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Northwestern, Ohio State, Southern Methodist, and the University of Virginia — will receive the assessment tool.
OSTP is organizing an initiative to create a “weather service” for pandemics, Kalil said, a way to use big data to identify and predict pandemics as early as possible in order to plan and prepare for — and hopefully mitigate — their effects.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, is undertaking its ” Big Data to Knowledge” (BD2K) initiative to develop a range of standards, tools, software, and other approaches to make use of massive amounts of data being generated by the health and medical research community….”
See also:
November 12, 2013 – Fact Sheet: Progress by Federal Agencies: Data to Knowledge to Action
November 12, 2013 – Fact Sheet: New Announcements: Data to Knowledge to Action
November 12, 2013 – Press Release: Data to Knowledge to Action Event